Idea Carinderia: Old Love Letters

I was going through my things just this morning. My room was desperately needing some major attention. I started by picking up the odd piece of clothing, paper, book, toys (yes, I still have toys), putting each in its niche and tidying up the floor or rather what I had left of it.

It’s amazing what one can accumulate in just a span of a few days and I haven’t really made much effort in keeping the room tidy for at least a month.

It’s a cool thing, having a room of your own. It’s like your own little world, your little fiefdom. Here, you call the shots. My source of solace and solitude. I close my door and I’m safe. And so, in the solitude I pick up the reminders of my life.

I have so many CDs. Not just music CDs, PC CDs, Playstation CDs, Pirated CDs, (hey, I’m no hypocrite. Besides, to me piracy is just another form of free enterprise). And so I pick up the clutter on my desk, shelves and floor and put them in their proper compartments.

The box I picked up contains my memories. I never meant to linger. I was just going to put some photos of my exes in this box of shame. You see, this box contains old love letters from the women in my life who left me.

No, I’m not bitter. But I could be a masochist. I do not derive pleasure from the emotional distress it brings. Neither does it inflate my ego, knowing that these wonderful women professed love, lust and desire for me. It is more of a reminder of my failures. Though I know I cannot be perfect, it is a reminder of how, at some point in time, I was not enough.

Breakups are totally debilitating to the ego. They make you feel like shit. And in this box, I see so much shit I’ve made. The contents of this box go back 15 years. That’s quite a lot coming from someone who is just 3 years shy of thirty. Everything from puppy love to that bitch you just love to hate. It’s a dawg’s life.

So, wazzap dawg!?

Not my ego, not just yet. It’s funny how old reminiscences still have some potency and crisp clarity. It must probably be some totally fantastic remembrance or some totally tragic circumstance. Yet some are just as soft as the murmur of a whisper yet just as moving.

I heard of some people returning and even burning their letters. That doesn’t work for me. For some, it makes it easier to let go and move on. But I guess that’s not for me. It’s true you know, you can’t go forward without accepting your past. It makes a difference knowing where you’ve come from. How much you’ve changed, or how much you haven’t. This box gives me something to push off from. And from where I am, it gives me an idea of where to go.

As I pick up the emotional clutter in my life, moving on, not necessarily moving forward. But rather, just moving. It begins to mean something, “the journey” being more important than the “destination”. Living life and experiencing all of it, including the lows. I guess you can’t really say you’ve lived until you’ve almost died.

It has made me a better man, I think, I hope, it damn well had better after all that. It is better to have loved and lost, 'coz somehow, sometime, somewhere, you just might win. And it will have been worth it.

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